A new version of the Mesa graphics library has been released.
Mesa 25.0 features Vulkan 1.4 support, which the team bill as the ‘flashiest addition’ in this new development release as it spans Anv (Intel), Asahi (Apple), Lavapipe (software), NVK (NVIDIA), PanVK (Mali), RADV (AMD), and Turnip (Qualcomm).
The OpenGL 4.6 API also sees implementation in Mesa 25.0 though the version reported will depend on the hardware driver in use since not all drivers support all features OpenGL 4.6 requires.
AMD RDNA4 graphics sees initial support in the RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) and RADV (Vulkan) drivers is present, the former worked on by AMD themselves and the latter by engineers at gaming company Valve.
The Intel ANV Vulkan driver adds AV1 video decoding.
Over on ARM, the PanVK driver expands its array Vulkan extensions including depth clamping and depth bias clamping, indirect drawing, and a slew of new shaders. The PanVK driver also now supports Vulkan 1.1 on v10+ hardware.
Bug fixes naturally feature, including a number related to regressions in video decoding – VA-API, VDPAU AV1, and VC1 on Radeon among the ones name-checked in the release notes.
A bunch of bug fixes to directly benefit gamers also feature in Mesa 25.0.
Visual corruption issues in Cyberpunk 2077 were sorted; oversized crosshairs in THE FINALS resolved; and dark glitches and black artefacts in Disney Speedstorm, Immortals Fenyx Rising and Ghost of Tsushima banished.
Other games to see tweaks include Resident Evil 2, 3 and 6; Borderlands 4, Portal 2, and Half-Life 2; Hogwarts Legacy, Dota 2, and Age of Mythology: Retold.
Finally and, perhaps, most notably, Mesa 25.0 also introduces native context support for virtio. This will allow native AMD drivers (radeonsi, radeonsi_drv_video and radv) to be used in guest virtual machines directly (QEMU with KVM).
Mesa 25.0.1 will be released on March 5th. The general advice to those looking to update is to wait until that stable build lands. Those who can’t can head to the official Mesa archive site to download Mesa 25.0 source code.
Oibaf’s iconic (yet unofficial, unsupported, etc) open graphics driver PPA is already packaging Mesa 25.0 builds for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS through 25.04 daily builds.
Plucky’s Choice?
It’s not yet clear (to me) which Mesa version the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will offer. It’d be nice if it was 25.0 since it will mean the next HWE update delivers the bulk of the new features and fixes listed above to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users.
As of writing, Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds ship with Mesa 24.3.4.